FOSSwire

The new release boasts an updated Live CD installer, the Live CD now using Xfce by default, vastly improved hardware support and many updated packages to bring the core system up to date.

For those new, or who haven't heard of the distribution, Gentoo is generally aimed towards the more experienced Linux user. While it does feature its Portage package management system, Gentoo puts emphasis on building software from source to fully optimise the system and squeeze as much performance as possible from your machine.

You can download many versions of the new release from the official download page.

FSF-sponsored GNU/Linux distribution gNewSense has recently been updated to version 2.0. The release announcement states:

I've just released the LiveCD for gNewSense 2.0, the first full release of DeltaH.
This is less than a week after Hardy was released.

All bugs reported since the 1.9 beta have been addressed. Thank you to everyone who reported bugs, they were useful in making this release better.

For those not already in the know, gNewSense is a distribution based upon Ubuntu. The aim of the distro is to strip Ubuntu of all non-free software components and offer a completely 'pure' free software distribution to those who wish for it. This new 2.0 release is based upon the recent Ubuntu Hardy Heron version, as the announcement states.

Other than the removal of non-free components, and lack of Ubuntu branding, there isn't an awful lot of difference between gNewSense and the distro it is derived from. Nevertheless, for people looking for a complete operating system that has no proprietary components, gNewSense offers this with the same ease of installation and use as Ubuntu.

You can download the new gNewSense release using the available torrents, or download normally using a mirror.

SystemRescueCD, which I covered very recently has just released version 1.0.1.

The new version features JWM as the window manager to replace WindowMaker, updates much of the included software to the latest versions (including Gparted), includes some new features and fixes several bugs.

• Using JWM-2.0.1 as default Window-Manager instead of Window-Maker
  
• Using unionfs-2.2.4 as the root filesystem (all files are now writable)
  
• Updated sys-block/gparted to 0.3.6 (add support for the labels)
  
• Updated squashfs to 3.3 (with LZMA compression) to save space
  
• Updated sys-fs/ntfsprogs to 2.0.0 since it's marked as stable in gentoo
  
• Updated sys-fs/ntfs3g to 1.2310 (ntfs full read-write support)
  
• Updated the Memtest86+ floppy disk image to 2.01
  
• Updated the btrfs filesystem support to 0.13 (kernel patch and utils)
  
• Updated the default kernel to Linux-2.6.24.04 with Reiser4 (rescuecd + rescue64)
  
• Updated app-cdr/cdrkit-1.1.7.1 (Fix for Joliet directory length bug)
  
• Added sys-apps/ipmitool (Utility for controlling IPMI enabled devices)
  
• Added missing crypto modules in the default kernel (rescuecd + rescue64)
  
• Added skipmount=/dev/xxx option that prevents the system from mounting a device
  
• Replaced cryptsetup-luks with cryptsetup-1.0.5
  
• Autodetect software raid volumes at boot time using 'mdadm --auto-detect'
  
• Fixed an autorun bug introduced in 1.0.0: no stdout for interactive scripts

• Fixed bugs in the network configuration boot options (ethx, gateway, dns)
  
• Fixed problems with udhcpc client when multiple ethernet interfaces exists
  
• Prevents multiple setkmap when "sysresccd-custom setkmap" used several times
  

The full release notes are here, and the live CD can be downloaded from the site.